There is something dark and twisting that brings him here. A part of him that feels at home. Maybe it is the vestiges of the fetid magic that cast him into a statue’s sleep deep within the catacombs. He slept, frozen in a scream of rage, for years. Dirt and the dust of bones settled across his caramel skin. Cairo was buried alive, sunk into darkness, chained by magic.
He was a teryr’s child and the sun has always felt warm across his spine. The desert skies have always been his to patrol, the sun gilding his back. But now the sun feels too much. Now it is something awful that brings him here, striding deeper into dank darkness.
Mildew clings to the damp, cold walls. Darkness yawns her mouth wide open and into it the leonine Arete stalks. His tail twitches with his ire, the rustle of tailfeathers over stones fill Abigo with a thousand whispers. Whispers of desire, of lies, riddles and deceit. All of the caves are full of tales carved into stone. Water drips like a pulse. It taps along his spine as the mountains stand sentinel above him.
Cairo was made for the skies and yet he presses on and on and on, an eagle crawling its way underground. Where one man brings starlight and the woman brings a red as bright as blood dripping from too-sharp fangs, so Cairo drags with him the sun, the sand, the desert heat. It ripples off his skin, heating the air as he steps out from the cave to where a woman and a man stand close.
His strides are liquid and his body disjointed with the supple langour of the alcohol haze that still laces through his veins. Cairo smiles as dangerous as a lion stalking toward its prey. Aquiline he studies the contours of their shadows, the curves of hips and throats and the length of slender limbs.
He comes to them filled with the horror of endless nights frozen within a catacomb.
He comes to them drunk upon the joy that the only man he loves is also alive and no longer buried.
He comes to them still drunk upon the alcohol he drank to forget the touch of such a man last night.
He comes to them still aching with the pain the alcohol does not erase. The pain that reminds him that not even a decade asleep has managed to erase the hurt of Zayir running off with another man.
He comes to them in the dark bowels of the earth to wonder if it might be better to sleep again for another century.
“It is a dark place to meet lovers.” Cairo breathes with a voice that climbs the walls and pours across stone hot as sunlight. Already his body is remembering the darkness, the solitude, the endless night. His body brushes against the man and the woman as he passes them, flank to flank and hip to hip. Avian, his gaze turns, tipping towards the girl. Kohl lined lashes are heavy over his golden eyes. He inhales their scents, the only things fresh here, the only things living. He feels his pulse within his throat, it reminds him he is still alive, alive, alive. “You don’t mind the presence of another, do you?” Cairo asks, the words falling like a purr.
@Euryale @Asterion
